of tailors is composed of 2,800 masters, who have under
them 5,000 workmen. "Add to these the number privately employed--the
refugees in privileged places like the abbeys of Saint-Germain and
Saint-Marcel, the vast enclosure of the Temple, that of Saint-John the
Lateran, and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and you will find at least
12,000 persons cutting, fitting, and sewing." How many in these two
groups are now idle! How many others are walking the streets, such
as upholsterers, lace-makers, embroiderers, fan-makers, gilders,
carnage-makers, binders, engravers, and all the other producers of
Parisian nick-nacks! For those who are still at work how many days are
lost at the doors of bakers' shops and in patrolling as National
Guards! Gatherings are formed in spite of the prohibitions of the
Hotel-de-Ville,[1414] and the crowd openly discuss their miserable
condition: 3,000 journeymen-tailors near the Colonnade,
as many journeymen-shoemakers in the Place Louis XV., the
journeymen-hairdressers in the Champs-Elysees, 4,000 domestics without
places on the approaches to the Louvre,--and their propositions are on a
level with their intelligence. Servants demand the expulsion from
Paris of the Savoyards who enter into competition with them.
Journeymen-tailors demand that a day's wages be fixed at forty sous, and
that the old-clothes dealers shall not be allowed to make new ones. The
journeymen-shoemakers declare that those who make shoes below the fixed
price shall be driven out of the kingdom. Each of these irritated and
agitated crowds contains the germ of an outbreak--and, in truth, these
germs are found on every pavement in Paris: at the relief works, which
at Montmartre collect 17,000 paupers; in the Market, where the bakers
want to hang the flour commissioners, and at the doors of the bakers,
of whom two, on the 14th of September and on the 5th of October, are
conducted to the lamp post and barely escape with their lives.--In this
suffering, mendicant crowd, enterprising men become more numerous every
day: they consist of deserters, and from every regiment; they reach
Paris in bands, often 250 in one day. There, "caressed and fed to the
top of their bent,"[1415] having received from the National Assembly
50 livres each, maintained by the King in the enjoyment of their
advance-money, entertained by the districts, of which one alone incurs
a debt of 14,000 livres for wine and sausages furnished to them, "they
accustom themse